It's been 169 years since Samuel Morse first strung wires high up on wooden poles stretching from Washington to Baltimore for his telegraph invention. Today, do we still need to litter Northeast Pennsylvania with utility poles carrying a maze of wires in all directions?

A new law authorizes Pennsylvania utilities to charge customers an extra fee to cover the costs of repairing and upgrading their infrastructure. The law, inspired primarily by a 2011 fatal gas explosion in Allentown, encourages gas companies to replace steel and iron gas pipes with safer plastic ones.

But the law doesn't just cover gas utilities. PPL Electric Utilities, which covers much of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area, is the state's first electric utility to propose using the new fee to accelerate the removal and replacement of utility poles and aging wires, among other things.

Once PPL has readily accessible funds for upgrades, perhaps it should reconsider how it runs its electric lines. Water, sewer, and gas pipes are buried, of course, for obvious reasons. In recent decades, PPL and other power companies have likewise buried wires in downtown areas of cities and in new suburban development.

Underground lines are far more impervious to storms than wires on poles, they are less costly to maintain - and they eliminate a major form of visual blight.

But the majority of lines are still hung from poles because retaining them is less expensive than the upfront cost of placing them underground. Thousands of utility poles still line the streets of our urban areas, carrying a mass of wires that mutilate our vistas. Because street trees must share the same public right of way as utility poles, power companies like PPL spend millions of dollars annually trimming tree limbs away from the wires, disfiguring the trees in the process.

Conventional wisdom calls for planting very short trees under wires or avoiding trees altogether. But in urban areas like Scranton, big shade trees lining the streets provide huge benefits.

Deciduous trees not only bring much-needed beauty and nature to densely populated areas, they reduce energy consumption. Cities are heat sinks in the summer: Urban temperatures are often 5 degrees above surrounding suburbs and rural areas, caused by the thousands of rooftops, jam-packed along miles of streets, interspersed with acres of parking lots, all absorbing the heat of the sun.

By cooling the air beneath them, urban trees reduce the need for air conditioning. One study reported in the MIT Review concluded that mature trees and light-colored surfaces, which reflect the sun's rays, might reduce the need for air conditioning in cities as much as 20 percent, an enormous savings.

Trees also play a vital role in stormwater management. One big shade tree can absorb a thousand gallons of storm water a year. That's why Pennvest, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority, has granted millions of dollars to municipalities in recent years to plant trees in urban areas, to intercept stormwater before it overwhelms conventional infrastructure like culverts and pipes.

Likewise, Scranton will be planting 150 trees this spring, adding to the hundreds already planted in recent years along Scranton's 240 miles of right of way.

If burying electric wires is deemed too expensive to protect trees and scenery, a compromise solution is "tree cable," a system of bundling electric wires on utility poles so tall deciduous trees can grow around them.

Utility poles usually carry three or four sets of wires. The highest wires carry electricity. Typically, crossarms are mounted at the top of utility poles which provide wide "air gaps" for bare electrified wires. These crossarms take up an enormous amount of horizontal space, requiring heavy pruning of tree branches.

But insulated power wires can be bundled together with a small amount of separation provided by cross-shaped plastic "spacers." Bundled wiring requires far less clearance, so trees branches can grow up and around power lines (as well as the phone and cable wires below them), screening all the wires from view. Bundled wiring is not only aesthetically better, it requires less tree pruning, and insulated power wires are less likely to short circuit in high winds.

Aerial wires hanging over our streets have been around so long we think they're a necessary part of the landscape. They aren't. We should either bury them or screen them with trees.

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